CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

Here’s a book that makes you realize why there aren’t very many female authors in history.  Tove grows up poor in Copenhagen in the early twentieth century. However such is her love of writing that she can say:

. . on my fifth birthday (my father) gave me a wonderful edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without which my childhood would have been grey and dreary and impoverished

I would think with the rickets and the diphtheria and everything you can still qualify as having an impoverished childhood. (Side point: It’s quite refreshing really to realize anyone was ever poor in these Scandinavian countries; on my side I am quite exhausted by all this blond hair and equality and hygge.).

She is, as are it seems many aspiring writers, a misfit. (Why is nobody’s memoir ever about how popular they were?). Far from school days being the best days of your life, she says that:

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.

The point is anyway that she is desperate to be a writer, and as this is the first of a trilogy, we can only assume she succeeds, but I can’t imagine how, as the books ends with her being forced out of school at fourteen (reason: she is female) and starting work as a child minder. I couldn’t help but think of the many thousands of girls of limited means in centuries past who longed just as passionately as her and didn’t make it.  And that’s only thinking of the tiny subset who lucked into literacy and so could even consider a writing career.  I will read the next two books in the trilogy and let you know how she managed it.

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